Border War hate is back, and it’s great! But Mizzou’s gotta get better at basketball
The hate bounces off the rafters and bangs the eardrums and tastes like candy.
The hate comes quick, and never stops, right from the moment Thomas Robinson’s, um, physical block on Phil Pressey plays on the video board just as Missouri’s basketball players run onto the Allen Fieldhouse court, through Kansas forward Christian Braun appearing to trash-talk his brother’s old coach.
We heard multiple chants that we can’t print here — who’s your daddy was the most respectful — and the concrete steps of this old gym literally shook as an otherwise meaningless three-pointer by a walk-on provided the final score of 102-65 in a Kansas blowout that felt like no 37-point spread in college basketball history.
Deep breath.
That’s a lot.
Tough moment for the wE dOn’T cArE aBoUt ThIs RiVaLrY crowd.
“That was the most fun I’ve had in my life,” Braun said.
“I really couldn’t even hear, for real,” guard Dajuan Harris said.
“Coach really did put an emphasis on it,” guard Ochai Agbaji said.
Kansas City’s best rivalry — and, really, No. 2 might be Us vs. Random BBQ Lists Where We Don’t Rank First — is back after nine unnecessary years off. KU is still getting a kind whistle at Allen Fieldhouse, but so much else has changed.
Here’s one example: The world seems to be filled with a lot more real-life hate now, so letting the heartbeat race over a basketball game felt like a relief.
Here’s one more: Mizzou stinks, and there’s only so many times this rivalry can rock like this when one side is so woefully overmatched.
“It was fun playing in front of a crowd like this,” Mizzou forward Kobe Brown said. “Haven’t had many games in front of a crowd like that before.”
These programs played two of the best games college basketball can offer in 2012. Kansas should have won the game in Columbia, and blew it late. Mizzou should have won the game in Lawrence, and blew it late. A third game in the Big 12 tournament final was spoiled when KU lost to Baylor, but the Jayhawks made it all the way to the national final that spring.
They’re now ranked eighth, and even more loaded than that suggests, so in that way not much has changed.
Ahem.
Mizzou won 30 games in 2012, the second-most in program history. That team was a credit to the sport, one of the toughest to defend in years.
They’re now 5-5 and lost to the Kansas City Roos. So in that way, too much has changed.
This was awful timing for the program in general and coach Cuonzo Martin in particular. Nobody needs the reboot of one of sports’ most meaningful and historical rivalries to be a showcase of how far behind you are.
“I guess if you’re keeping score it’s 1-0,” Martin said. “That’s it.”
Martin used his post-game time with reporters to downplay basically everything about this game. Everyone else marveled at the noise. Martin said “it’s a basketball game” and “I’ve been in loud venues” and “I could communicate with my guys.”
In his defense, there wasn’t much to analyze. Mizzou just got trucked. The game plan centered on guarding the paint and forcing Kansas to hit contested 3s. Even in the best circumstances, that’s a strategy based a little too much on hope but it turned to ash when Dajuan Harris hit is first 3 of the season (and then two more, and KU shot 14-of-27 overall).
But, really, this was never going to be close. KU just has too much talent. Mizzou has way too little. This is when we usually start to look at the head coach.
Martin is typically vague in in post-game news conferences, so it’s hard to know how much of his words might be self-protection. But he has to know the walls are closing in. This is his fifth season, and even if the adults in this conversation can recognize he had some awful luck with injuries to the Porter brothers, nobody can argue that the program shouldn’t be in better shape by now.
He’s 20-32 in the SEC the last three seasons. Mizzou is currently ranked 151st by KenPom, second-worst among all Power 5 programs. Martin’s buyout dropped from $6 million to $3 million this spring, will drop to $1 million on May 1, and it’s never good when reporters are Googling a coach’s buyout.
“We just lost the game, in my opinion,” Martin said. “We lost to a good team. We’ll learn from it and move on.”
The football portion of this rivalry restarts in four years, and football figures to lean back toward Mizzou. But that could be way too far away for Martin to use his suite at football games.
Martin is a deeply admirable man. He stands for and is motivated by the best ideals. But right now he’s scrambling, the tide is rushing against him, and the problems were just spotlighted on national television with the rivalry’s biggest margin since 1977.
Kansas City sports are better when Missouri and Kansas are playing each other. It’s more fun when the rivalry isn’t confined to message boards. An arena full of old fashioned, well-intentioned sports hate is a beloved and important American institution.
The Border War hate is activated, and we’re better off for it.
But now Mizzou needs to make the game worth anticipating again — one way or the other.
This story was originally published December 11, 2021 at 6:48 PM with the headline "Border War hate is back, and it’s great! But Mizzou’s gotta get better at basketball."